Money is one of the most ingenious inventions of man, if not the most ingenious so far. It is the most important facilitator of division of labour. In a very advanced human civilization, labour is infinitely divided and hundreds if not thousands of people have to contribute daily to the enrichment of the daily life of an individual and all must be compensated in some way. If a farmer wants to buy clothes for instance, he can not pay for the clothes with farm produce, since the clothes seller may already have the produce the farmer is placing on offer, so, money was invented to represent value. Money is a tool to facilitate trade and division of labour and therefore should never be seen as property in itself. My daily life is enriched by thousands of people. Transporters, Landlord, phone companies, satellite companies, pay tv companies, internet companies, tailors, traffic wardens, shoe makers, soldiers, UN, online blog operators, face book people, Police, CIA people and etc. Thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people, all of whom have one contribution or the other to my daily life. It is only made possible because money was invented to facilitate the division of labour. If I were a member of a tribe in the Amazon forest in Brazil or a bush man in the Kalahari desert of South Africa, I would not need money and my life would subsequently not be as rich as it is today, though I might be happier. I would not be able to communicate with someone on the opposite side of the globe or access stuff on the internet and etc.

Having thus established that money is invaluable for an advanced human civilization to keep thriving, we now come to the question of which is the best form of money? We must keep in mind that money should not be seen as an end in itself but as something fluid that must never be hoarded, only used as a tool to facilitate trade and division of labour. It does not need to be valuable and should in fact not be valuable in itself but merely agreed upon by consensus to be used as a store of value.

So I will say money should be a substance agreed upon to be used by all as a store of value for the purpose of facilitating trade and division of labour to make life richer. This agreed upon store of value should not be valuable in itself and should preferably not be useful for any other purpose. The introduction of new money should not be at a runaway rate and should not be monopolized by anyone or group. Government or individual.

The most widespread money ever used by different human cultures across the globe is the cowry shell and it fits the definition above. Among the Yoruba, the custodian of Aje (money) is the Orisa Olokun or Olu Okun. Owner of the seas from whose belly cowry shells come from. Not some Central banks who inflate currencies anyhow. The Yoruba used to use Central bank money in the past in the form of Akun beads and etc produced by the Yoruba, then the Oyo traded in gold with the Malians, Arabs and etc.

Later in the modern post industrial revolution era, we have the gold standard by which currencies are backed by gold. A dollar used to be a gold certificate, then silver certificate but nowadays, it is no certificate as it has been inflated away just like other currencies. In the past, all issued currencies were backed with precious metals in bank vaults. You deposit your gold with the bank of London and get issued a certificate saying you have so, so amount of gold with that bank and traders will take the certificate from you in lieu of gold but nowadays, banks issue currency of a million gold tonnes while having 50 thousand tonnes of gold in stock. However, central banks across the world still hoard gold and other precious metals as a capital base and they continue driving the price up as a result. So, gold mining activities are still on to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per annum. This demand for gold for the purpose of hoarding, skyrockets the price of gold.

What the world needs nowadays in my view is to singularise its currency by inflating all currencies uniformly or at agreed rates determined by consensus. This maybe necessary as population and economic growth rates are not equal across board. Once such a consensus is reached, the obsession of central banks with gold will end and gold will be used only for jewelries and industrial purposes leading to a price fall since the Central banks will cause a glut by offloading their vaults to the market. Gold mining activities will be down for some time after that.

There was a human civilization that came to Earth, landing in South Africa to mine gold around 200 thousand years ago, they must have moved thousands of tonnes for their central banks to store in vaults, those gold worshippers. That is the energy sapping path we are following with our current monetary system and I daresay it is not the right path as gold is not food that we need to eat or water that we can not do without. We have no reasons to be slaves to gold.